Chapter Five
CHAPTER FIVE
Joan first slept with Bill in Carmel. He’d suggested Napa for a weekend, but Joan wasn’t a big drinker.
Her face flushed when she consumed alcohol, and it wasn’t a rosy pink but a full-throated red, and soon after her head would pound.
She only ever experienced a few minutes of exaltation when she drank, a thin fizzy feeling that quickly evaporated.
Joan was pleasantly surprised, once they finally slept together, by Bill’s body.
She realized subconsciously she’d feared Bill might resemble her father, who had a wide droopy belly and raised liver spots all over his back.
But Bill was fit in a manner Joan would later recognize as if not entirely inhabited by Californians, then at least well represented by them: a combination of trim and clean and sunned.
Over their time together, she had begun to understand why some women prefer older men, or at least a certain sort of older man: the kind with maturity and taste and means.
Yes, the means! Their hotel in Carmel was the most beautiful hotel Joan had ever seen, each room an individual cottage set amid lavender fields.
Even sitting in Bill’s car, being moved from A to B without having to dodge traffic on her bicycle—oh, Joan could see the appeal!
But on those drives with Bill through Stanford’s campus, she would occasionally glance out the window at the runners on the dirt side path; she would see the lustrous taut skin of men in their twenties, the sharp cut of their faces and bodies, and a fresh anxiety would bloom.
But. Here in Carmel there was only Bill.
In bed he had none of the urgent jerkiness of Milton, the arrogance and desire to try anything, prove everything.
Joan had the sense that not only did Bill know what he was doing, he’d been told he knew.
Their first night together, she reached out and stroked his shoulder, and he grinned because he thought it an intimate gesture, but for Joan it was more than tenderness.
She wanted to touch someone who’d traveled along life’s arc with such good fortune; she wanted to feel his flesh, stroking it over and over as you might a charm, hoping some of its luck will pass on to you.
“How do you speak English so well?” Bill asked their first night. In bed together, after, he emitted a swirl of lazy contentment and triumph that Joan was startled to recognize from her time with Milton. He wrapped an arm around her.
“I learned it in school in Taipei.”
“Does everyone?”
“Everyone in a good school,” Joan said. She’d gone to the best college in Taiwan but knew it meant nothing to him; she could try to explain, but he wouldn’t understand.
“You know, I really haven’t been married that many times,” Bill said the second night.
His expression was serious, so Joan was careful not to laugh. She considered three quite a few times to be married. Although I’ve been married too, she recalled with surprise.
“The first one counts, of course. That’s when I had my kids. You can’t regret children. I suppose some do, but not me.” Bill bent his arm behind his head. The hair on his chest was sparse and light gold. He described his first wife as difficult .
“What makes her difficult?”
“All sorts of things. You know what a WASP is?”
“No.”
Bill explained, though it still didn’t make sense to Joan.
“They’re repressed, that’s all. Old money—they’ve got hobbies and jobs and ways of living they deem acceptable, and everything else is ‘gauche.’ When the kids were young, Agatha and I would take them to a certain restaurant for their birthdays.
After the cake came, I’d ask the waiter to take a photo.
Agatha hated that. She said it was rude, that it called too much attention to us.
For Christ’s sake! It’s a child’s birthday! ”
“Really,” Joan said with genuine attention. She was interested in snobs. It wasn’t that she admired Bill’s first wife, but she did want to know how such a woman inhabited the world, how she ate and dressed and traveled.
“Marriage isn’t always an ideal state,” Bill said.
Yes, Joan agreed. It really wasn’t.
They were supposed to spend only two nights in Carmel but extended it to four.
Joan called in sick—her first time doing so—to Lotus Garden.
She also used the hotel phone to call Mrs. Mahoney, to simply check in.
Joan knew Iris was terrified of falling and dying alone in the house; it was one of the reasons she rented out her attic.
Joan and Bill spent their last day in Carmel by the pool. The resort had a lovely pool, sparkling clean and with enough loungers that one never had to wait for a seat. As soon as a guest rose from a chair, attendants would rush forth, refolding towels and clearing away drinks.
Joan owned one bathing suit, purchased her first month in America, a blue one-piece she’d thought perfectly acceptable at the time but now, in such lush surroundings, found drab and old-fashioned.
The fabric was starting to pill, and she was self-conscious next to the rows of women in their brilliant bikinis, toned legs glittering in the sun.
She’d brought one of Bill’s shirts in her bag, and after she toweled off, Joan quickly buttoned it over herself and joined Bill at his table in the shade.
“Is that my shirt?” Bill asked.
“Yes. Is that okay?” She had not asked him for permission, knowing he wouldn’t mind. Bill’s clothes were all beautiful, and he treated each piece as if he had an infinite supply, using his arm to wipe wine spills.
“Of course. It looks better on you than on me.”
She stroked the cotton. It was cool and tightly woven, so much so that it felt like silk.
“It’s from Charvet,” Bill remarked. He was eating a banana, as she’d recently told him he should consume more fruit.
“Charvet,” she repeated.
“A store in Paris. My girlfriend at the time chose it.”
“Oh.”
“You’re not upset when I talk about past girlfriends, are you? You don’t seem to have any curiosity about them.”
“I’m very curious,” Joan said honestly.
“Ask me something, then.”
There was so much she wanted to know: what languages they spoke, whether they wore flats more or high heels, the color of their hair. “Have all your girlfriends been younger than you?”
“Not all.” He stroked her cheek. “You are beautiful, just absolutely lovely.”
“Have they all been Caucasian?”
“Yes. Some Europeans. And a Cuban.”
A short distance behind Bill, a thin blonde shrugged out of a caftan and piled her hair high up on her head in an elegant fashion Joan knew she could never replicate with her own slippery locks. “Why do you like younger women?” Joan asked, looking at the blonde.
“Wouldn’t you?”
“Ha ha,” she said, though a part of Joan wished Bill hadn’t stated things so plainly.
Being young wasn’t the same as being smart or clever.
There was an expiration: one day you had youth, but eventually it went.
She had it now; Bill had had it, she thought a little sourly. Still, at least he was honest.
The blonde made a splash as she dove into the water, and at the shallow end two swimmers emerged and strode to the hot tub.
Joan thought she could feel the eyes of the other guests on her.
What were they thinking? That she was young, maybe, and that Bill was old, and all the associated inferences.
That she didn’t belong here, and they were wondering how she had come to be at such an exclusive place.
Joan didn’t know either. Had it really begun on that bench at Stanford?
It seemed incredible that luck could be distributed not only so randomly but also exponentially —that a different bench, an alternate Sunday class, might have meant her never experiencing this hotel as long as she lived.
Bill smiled at her, his eyes friendly. How lucky Joan was, to have met someone like him. He knew so much of the world; he was cultured and smart and kind. She reached, and he caught her hand and bent over her fingers and kissed them. “I am so happy,” he said.